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Photos: Antarctica's Glaciers, Icebergs, and Penguins

Sebastião Salgado captures Antarctica's breathtaking beauty in this gallery of photos and exclusive outtakes from "The Last Wild Place" by Graham Boynton. Locations include Deception Island, Neko Harbor, Errera Channel, and Paradise Bay.

As far as some historians can determine, the first man to set foot on Antarctica was French explorer Jules-Sébastien-César Dumont d’Urville, in 1840. Its Deception Island, whose black volcanic sands conceal hot springs, is favored by chinstrap penguins, which come here to breed—and can dive in Antarctic waters to depths of up to 230 feet.

Researchers flock to twenty-first-century Antarctica to study everything from the planet’s geologic history to global warming to, yes, penguins—like these on Deception Island. There are more than 12 million chinstraps (named for the thin black line

under their chin) in the Antarctic region.

Looking like something from a dream or a Spielberg movie, an iceberg looms in the Errera Channel, which was discovered by the Belgian Antarctic Expedition in the late nineteenth century. Antarctica contains 90 percent of the planet’s ice.

The tip of an iceberg in the Errera Channel. For all its rigors, your Antarctic voyage will be a big cut above those of earlier polar explorers—whose experience was described in the 1922 classic, The Worst Journey in the World, as “the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.”

The Drake Passage—the 500-mile crossing from Cape Horn to Antarctica where the Atlantic and Pacific oceans meet—is famously one of the world’s most grueling, the price you pay for seeing the glories beyond. Some wouldn’t dream of dodging the so-called Drake Tax, but there is now an easy way out if you’re prone to serious seasickness—you can fly direct to King George Island.

Crabeater seals (they actually feed on krill, not crab) lounging on Cuverville Island. The continent is so vast and still so fundamentally unknown that informed guesses of their numbers range from 15 million to 50 million.

Male and female chinstraps take turns sitting on their eggs for six-day shifts until the chicks hatch, around day 37.

A waddle of chinstrap penguins on Deception Island. These flightless marine birds live and breed in large colonies.

In winter, chinstrap penguins gather on icebergs, but for breeding they move to dry land like Deception Island and build round nests out of stones for breeding.

In order to see Mount Theodore in Andvord Bay, be sure to travel during Antarctica’s summer (roughly November through March). The continent is covered in darkness most of the rest of the year.

With only two inches of annual precipitation inland and eight inches along the coast, Antarctica is classified as a desert. It contains about 90 percent of the world’s ice, in the form of ice shelves, icebergs, and glaciers such as Grubb Glacier in Andvord Bay.